I consider myself rather lucky at the moment. I was recently amongst forty-four ‘carefully selected’ specialists within my organisation to spend a week at Microsoft’s pleasure in Redmond to kick-start our Windows Azure partnership. We forty-four good men and true (and women) were apparently selected because we’re the ‘best of the best’. Though my suspicion is that in certain cases, it’s because we were the ‘most of the available’.

This was my first deep immersion into Windows Azure, though I’d been doing a little homework beforehand. There’s a lot to know. Sure, at a simplistic level, it’s a virtualized, massively scalable environment for running new or existing applications. But if you think that’s all there is to it, you’re going to be in for a nasty surprise. Us architects, especially, need to raise our game and get to know Windows Azure (and cloud computing in general) in intimate detail if our customers aren’t going to be in for some nasty surprises.

In upcoming posts, I shall be talking more about moving to Azure and what that means for Sales, Architecture, Development and Service Management, because Azure cuts across all of these disciplines.